[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 28 (Thursday, February 16, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H1289-H1292]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   DISMANTLING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Johnson of Louisiana). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2017, the gentleman from 
Maryland (Mr. Raskin) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of 
the minority leader.
  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to be with you this 
afternoon. I have a series of other speakers who will be joining me 
later in the hour from the Progressive Caucus, as we discuss some of 
the key events of the week from our perspective.


                             General Leave

  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all the Members 
have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include 
extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Maryland?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I love magic, and I bet a lot of people out 
there watching today love magic, too. Ever since I was a kid, I loved 
the cup tricks, the card tricks, and the rabbit coming out of the hat. 
When I was in college, I even used to entertain at elementary school 
birthday parties, helping to pay my way through college.
  The key move in magic, as you know, Mr. Speaker, is the sleight of 
hand. I looked up the definition of ``sleight of hand'' in the Merriam-
Webster Dictionary, which defines it as a cleverly executed deception.
  A sleight of hand is also sometimes called a prestidigitation, quick 
fingers, or legerete de la main, which is the French phrase for 
``lightness of hand.'' It is defined as the set of closely related 
techniques used by a stage magician to manipulate the perceptions of 
the audience.
  Sleight of hand depends on the use of psychology, careful stage 
misdirection, constant blabbering, and strategic confusion to distract 
the audience.
  Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States has been masterfully 
deploying sleight of hand ever since his inauguration. With his nonstop 
tweeting and his incessant mad antics, the President distracts us from 
the real action, which is what is happening here in Congress. We are 
witnessing a magic trick on the world's largest stage, the auditorium 
of American democracy. And we, the people, are the captive, bedazzled, 
and totally distracted audience of the President. The tweets are a 
massive sleight of hand distracting us from the serious destruction of 
public policy and law that is taking place right here in Congress.

[[Page H1290]]

  


                              {time}  1700

  I want to say, at the outset, I prefer to think of this as a magic 
trick because the alternative that the President simply can't control 
himself is almost too horrific to contemplate.
  The Constitution does have a way of dealing with that problem, too, 
and you can find it in the 25th Amendment.
  Today, we are going to assume that all of this is a magic show. I 
used to coach kids' soccer. And when I coached soccer, I would always 
tell the kids: Don't bunch. Keep your eye on the ball. Stay in your 
lane and pass the ball.
  Without fail, the youngest kids who are just starting out, they all 
chase the ball. They move around the field in a big clump, a big mob. 
And I would say: Don't follow the mob that is following the ball. Go to 
where the ball is going to be going.
  When they are young, they don't know how to do it.
  I think that advice applies here as well to America, to the body 
politic. Don't follow the mob that is following the ball. Let's not be 
distracted full time by all the tomfoolery and tweetfoolery.
  There are important and dangerous things happening right here in 
Congress right now. While the President is tweeting insults and fake 
news and inflating his slender college victory and the size of his 
inaugural crowd and making fun of Meryl Streep and chatting about 
Nordstrom's department store and talking about how he is going to make 
Mexico pay for his wall and so on, what is taking place in Congress is 
the systematic dismantling of the regulatory apparatus that the 
American public depends on for clean air, clean water, safe food, a 
decent environment, and control of criminality in the country.
  The fundamental political action that we must be paying attention to 
now is the dismantling of the regulatory apparatus of the Federal 
Government, which is happening every day right here in the Halls of 
Congress. This is the apparatus that protects our food, our air, our 
water, our health care, our financial system, the ability of people to 
invest safely on Wall Street, occupational safety and health for our 
workers. All of this is being attacked in terrifying and often 
invisible ways.
  Behind the scenes, while the wizard of odd convenes a dinner in Mar-
a-Lago where he entertains a national security crisis discussion in 
full view of other diners who begin to tweet out and Facebook out what 
they are seeing happen, while all of that is happening, Congress is 
rolling back environmental protections to protect streams, rivers, and 
drinking water from pollution. They are savaging the rules that 
restrict the volume of greenhouse gas emissions that are leaked into 
the atmosphere, destabilizing our climate system. Check out H.J. Res. 
38 and 36.
  While the distractor in chief whines about leaks, while his whole 
campaign was based on leaks of emails that were captured by Russian 
agents working to get him elected, in Congress, they are rolling back 
financial regulations which ensure that workers have retirement savings 
options, H.J. Res. 66, and which protect consumers from excessive 
financial risks, H.R. 78.
  They have also targeted and rolled back labor regulations that 
promote safe and healthy workplaces and fair employment practices, H.J. 
Res. 37.
  Amazingly, while President Trump's National Security Adviser, General 
Flynn, was forced to resign when it was revealed that he had been 
colluding with Russians to lift the sanctions that the Obama 
administration had imposed on Russia, here in Congress, we are passing 
joint resolutions to rescind anticorruption regulations that required 
oil and gas companies to report monetary payments that they made to 
foreign governments, H.J. Res. 41.
  So Trump tweets about leaks, while his administration is one vast 
leak to the Russians. And here, Members of the GOP are working to throw 
an invisibility and secrecy cloak over corporate payments being made to 
foreign governments and corporations.
  While the world is distracted by all of the sleight of hand, this 
Congress is passing bills to give government back to giant corporations 
and special interests that care not for the common good but simply for 
their own bottom line.
  Mr. Speaker, as a freshman, I have been here for only 8 weeks. I have 
to tell you that I am disappointed that I have not voted on a single 
bill in the House Judiciary Committee that has had so much as a 
hearing. Yes, I want to repeat that. We have voted on five bills since 
I got here and not one of them has had a hearing.
  Now, I come from the Maryland State Senate where I proudly served for 
10 years as a State senator. When we had a bill coming up, no bill 
could be brought to the floor without a hearing first, and anybody who 
wanted to come testify on the bill could come testify on it. Now, that 
is not practicable here in the U.S. Congress. However, we could at 
least have experts relating to the bill and people who are affected by 
the bill come in and testify, but we haven't done that in the House 
Judiciary Committee. Instead, we voted on a series of bills which, to 
my mind, dramatically curtail the public interest.
  Yesterday, we voted on a bill to dismantle, essentially to put into a 
stifling straightjacket, the class-action mechanism that has been used 
over the decades to vindicate the interest of people who are victims of 
sex discrimination, victims of race discrimination, victims of toxic 
torts, victims of asbestos poisoning. We voted basically to trash class 
action yesterday without even so much as a bill.
  Now, on some of the other bills, it was said to me: Well, there were 
hearings in prior Congresses. One Member said: We had a hearing on that 
back in 2012.
  This is 2017, 5 years later. But on this particular bill that I am 
talking about, nobody even heard the bill. There was no hearing on it. 
It was simply brought up for a vote. That is irresponsible legislation. 
That is not real democracy when you don't even have a hearing and 
people who are affected by the legislation don't have the opportunity 
to come and talk about it.
  Now, they are not having hearings because they think--and they are 
probably right--we're not paying attention. What are we paying 
attention to? We are paying attention to the magician. We are paying 
attention to the wizard of odd. We are paying attention to the tweets 
instead.

  The good news is that the audience is starting to wise up. The whole 
country is waking up to the profound dangers of the administration's 
financial and political entanglements with Russia, with the Russian 
corporate and governmental elite.
  Just this week, the National Security Adviser, Mr. Flynn, resigned 
after reports came out about his communications with the Russian 
Ambassador while President Obama was still in office, communications 
dealing with the lifting of sanctions on Russia, communications that 
General Flynn lied about and was forced from office because of it. He 
misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his 
conversations with the diplomat, which was being monitored and recorded 
by the intelligence community.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow Americans, let's 
think about this for a moment. As a former chief of the Defense 
Intelligence Agency, Mr. Flynn was no innocent about the world of spy 
versus spy. He must have known that his telephone call with the Russian 
Ambassador was being monitored and recorded. If he really wanted to go 
rogue and operate on his own without the permission and the license of 
President Trump, he never would have allowed that telephone 
conversation to be recorded. But he did allow it to be recorded. He 
made the call with presumable full knowledge that other people in the 
intelligence community would be listening in on it, which leads me to 
the inescapable, logical conclusion that Flynn knew that, in making 
that call, he enjoyed the full support of the one person above him who 
could remove him from his job, the President of the United States.
  Now, do I know that? No, I don't know it. I surmise it. How are we 
going to know whether or not this is true? How do we get to the bottom 
of the Russian connection in the campaign? How do we get to the bottom 
of the Russian connection in the Trump administration?
  We need to have a full, complete, independent investigation by 
experts, like the 9/11 Commission, which gets to the bottom of this 
profound danger, this dagger pointed at the throat of American 
democracy.

[[Page H1291]]

  Mr. Speaker, everybody loves magic, I think. Everybody loves the 
enchantment of being fooled, of being distracted, of being diverted. 
That is why people go to magic shows. It is diverting. It is amusing. 
It is fun.
  Everybody loves a great magician, too. None was greater in our 
history than the great Houdini, who dazzled the world with his 
extraordinary optical illusions and effects, his amazing ability to 
simulate telepathy and telekinesis.
  Houdini also had a very strong ethical and professional code about 
being a magician. He never revealed a trick. More importantly, he never 
tried to fool people in order to defraud them. He never tried to fool 
people in order to humiliate them. He never tried to fool people in 
order to take away their rights. He never tried to fool people in order 
to demoralize and crush them or to strip them of their freedom. He 
never tried to fool people in order to victimize them.
  Indeed, in the 1920s, Mr. Houdini channeled all of his magnificent 
energy away from doing his magic shows and instead put it into the 
separate but related task of exposing psychics, mediums, con men, 
charlatans, and practitioners of the occult and the dark arts who did 
take advantage of people's good will, who did take advantage of 
people's impressionability to defraud them, to take their money, their 
belongings, and to distract them from the real world, and to undermine 
the moral and ethical principles that should govern human behavior and 
must govern social life.
  Although Houdini is no longer with us, he has great heirs today in 
socially responsible magicians like the Amazing Randi and Penn & 
Teller.
  Already millions of Americans themselves--millions of us in the 
audience--have woken up to the fact that we have been pulled into an 
irrational and dangerous fantasy world, an echo chamber of malignant 
narcissism, cruelty, and paranoia.
  It is time for all of us to stop being distracted, to stop being 
bedazzled, and pay attention to the real game, which is, one, trying to 
get America to join with Vladimir Putin, a dictator and an autocrat who 
said that the single greatest catastrophe of the 20th century was the 
dissolution of the Soviet Union, in order to create an international 
league of dictators, demagogues, and despots to violate human rights 
and crush liberal democracy; and, two, to dismantle at home the public 
regulatory infrastructure which protects our land, our air, our water, 
our climate, our liberties, our freedoms, our equal rights, and our 
capacity to function as the greatest democracy on Earth and to function 
as an efficient and effective government meeting the needs of the 
people.
  The magicians out there--there aren't many--but you have a special 
obligation to help us blow the whistle, and you are doing it. But it is 
really the American people--it is all of us who must stand up.
  The Constitution talks about three branches of government. Article I 
is Congress. Article II is the executive. Article III is the judiciary. 
Let's call Congress the first branch.
  But when you think about it, what is even more important than the 
Congress is the trunk, the roots of democracy. Everything grows up from 
the people. The branches are out there, but Congress works for the 
people. The President works for Congress and the people. The Supreme 
Court and the judiciary work for the people.
  It is time for the people to dissolve the spells that have been cast 
over the country, to say this is a democracy. We operate by the 
Constitution and the rule of law.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the distinguished gentlewoman from Illinois 
(Ms. Schakowsky).
  Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate participating in 
this Special Order hour about things that, I think, the American people 
really ought to be caring about.
  The minute that Donald Trump took the oath of office and put his hand 
in the air, he was in violation of the law. It is just a fact that the 
Trump Hotel, which is in the old post office building--there is a very 
explicit contract that says no elected official may enter into a 
contract for that hotel and profit from the business in that hotel. 
There was a lawsuit that was filed. It is still pending.
  You may not think that is a really big deal, but how about this: What 
if there were delegations from somewhere else in the world, some 
country that really wanted to curry favor with the United States of 
America, and decided a really good way to do it would be to move our 
delegation to stay at the Trump Hotel?

                              {time}  1715

  Maybe we could have a big gala, we could have a party, and we could 
make a lot of money from that. And guess what. Maybe the President of 
the United States would notice that we are spending money in a hotel 
from which he gains a profit, and that would be a really swell idea.
  Well, actually, the Framers of the Constitution thought that was not 
such a grand idea and very explicitly put into the Constitution 
something that would prohibit any foreign government from influencing 
U.S. policy. They were worried about the King of England. They were 
worried about France. They were worried about other countries having 
too much influence on the United States by currying favor with the 
President and the decisionmakers, and so they introduced and put into 
the Constitution very explicitly what they called the Emoluments Clause 
in Article I, section 9 of the Constitution.
  While ``emoluments'' is certainly not a word we use in regular 
conversations--emoluments, I never used it before this and never heard 
of it before this, actually--it is a concept that is part of our 
Constitution, and it is very simple: that no government official should 
receive benefits of any kind--of any kind--from a foreign government. 
President Trump is clearly violating that constitutional principle.
  So, unlike any Presidents before him, President Trump has actually 
refused to fully separate himself and his family from his business 
dealings. It is also very unusual, of course, that we haven't seen his 
tax returns, which has been pretty standard for any President to 
release his tax returns, and it has been a requirement for the Cabinet 
that Mr. Trump has exacted from those nominees.
  Because of his business holdings, Trump and his family are 
constantly--constantly--receiving benefits from other countries, 
whether it is foreign governments renting that space at the Trump Hotel 
in D.C. or the loans and business agreements that the Trump 
organization has with China, Russia, and many other countries. We don't 
know them all. We haven't seen them all. That would be in his tax 
returns and all the different sections of the tax return, his holdings 
in Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, which he has refused to put into a blind 
trust.
  So it is troubling enough that President Trump and his family are 
profiting off the Presidency, but now it is becoming clearer that this 
lack of ethics could threaten our national security and national 
interests. So if you haven't cared until now, you ought to start 
caring.
  Look at Russia. Trump has done business in Russia and has remained 
uncomfortably close to Vladimir Putin. He refuses to release his tax 
returns, which could clarify the specific financial interests that he 
has in Russia.
  President Trump knew his National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, 
was compromised by Russian intelligence and had misled Vice President 
Pence; yet Flynn was allowed to remain in one of our most sensitive 
national security positions until criticism from Congress, the media, 
and the public became too much to ignore.
  President Trump continues to gloss over the serious problems that led 
to Flynn's resignation. Instead, he attacks the messenger and the leaks 
that brought Flynn's conduct to light. These are bright red flags. 
These are signs that the President has something to hide.
  Americans deserve a President who they can trust is putting the 
country's interests ahead of his own, that he is putting the country's 
interests instead of another country's interests because that deal 
might be in his interest.
  There should be no question over the purity of the President's 
motives, especially when he is making critical security decisions on 
behalf of the Nation. If President Trump wants to assure the American 
people that he deserves our

[[Page H1292]]

trust, he must be transparent. We need a bipartisan, independent 
investigation of his conflicts of interest, particularly with Russia, 
but not exclusively. He must release his tax returns, and he must fully 
separate himself from his business dealings.
  The corrupt practices of this administration must stop. Our country 
and our Constitution demand nothing less.
  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from South Carolina 
(Mr. Clyburn), my good friend, the Assistant Democratic Leader.


        Honoring Voorhees College and Denmark Technical College

  Mr. CLYBURN. Mr. Speaker, I rise to continue honoring HBCUs, 
Historically Black Colleges and Universities, for their significant 
contributions to our Nation's history.
  While only 3 percent of our Nation's higher education institutions 
are Historically Black, HBCUs produce 20 percent of the African-
American college graduates. Today, I recognize and celebrate two of the 
seven HBCUs in my congressional district, Voorhees College and Denmark 
Technical College, both in Denmark, South Carolina.
  Voorhees College was founded as Denmark Industrial School in 1897 by 
Elizabeth Evelyn Wright when she was just 23 years old. Wright studied 
at Tuskegee Institute and was a devotee of Booker T. Washington. She 
had previously led efforts to start schools for African Americans in 
South Carolina, which were always met with arson and threats of 
violence. She persisted in her efforts to offer African Americans an 
opportunity for a better life and, with Voorhees, created an 
institution that would stand the test of time.
  Wright originally taught classes in an old store in Denmark, but, in 
1902, New Jersey philanthropist Ralph Voorhees donated money to 
purchase land and construct a building for the school. A high school at 
first, Voorhees offered classes at this level for African Americans in 
the area.
  In 1924, the Episcopal Church partnered with Voorhees, and an 
affiliation with that church continues to this day. The college began 
to offer junior college degrees in 1947 and 4-year degrees in 1962. 
While originally founded on the principles of Booker T. Washington to 
teach job and trade skills to African Americans, Voorhees now proudly 
claims to offer a blend of Washington's philosophy and that of W. E. B. 
Du Bois, who believed a classical liberal arts education was vital to 
the development of African Americans.

  The college's recently retired president, Dr. Cleveland Sellers, is a 
Denmark native who graduated from Voorhees High School. Sellers went on 
to Howard University, where he became active with the Student 
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, participating in its 1966 March 
against Fear.
  In 1968, after returning to South Carolina, Sellers was arrested and 
imprisoned for supposedly inciting the confrontation between students 
and police that became known as the Orangeburg massacre, when police 
opened fire on students, killing 3 and injuring 27.
  Voorhees' College's new president, Dr. W. Franklin Evans, previously 
served as interim president of my alma mater, South Carolina State. In 
that role, he successfully led South Carolina State out of a financial 
crisis. I sincerely believe that Voorhees College is well-positioned 
for the future with Dr. Evans at its helm.
  Denmark Technical College, whose campus is adjacent to Voorhees, was 
originally a branch of the South Carolina Trade School System. It was 
created in 1948 by the South Carolina General Assembly and mandated to 
provide trade skills to African Americans. During the ``separate but 
equal'' era, Denmark Tech was one of the few opportunities for trade 
school education offered to African Americans by the State.
  In the early 1960s, Governor Fritz Hollings and then-Senator John 
West led the effort to create the South Carolina Technical College 
System. In 1969, the existing trade school in Denmark was transferred 
into the system and the modern Denmark Technical College was created. 
Its total enrollment is approximately 2,000, 96 percent of whom are 
minority students. Denmark Tech continues to provide technical 
education and trade skills in its assigned region of Bamberg, Barnwell, 
and Allendale Counties.
  Voorhees College and Denmark Technical College, like their fellow 
HBCUs, have made an indelible impact on their communities, South 
Carolina, and the Nation. They have provided generations of African 
Americans educational opportunities, and I look forward to their 
continued success.
  Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, we should be joined momentarily by 
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee. I want to close out, though, my own 
thoughts by responding to something I have been hearing over the last 
week here in the Halls of Congress.
  Now that it is clear from our intelligence agencies, 16 of them, 
including the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the 
National Security Agency, and so on, that Vladimir Putin had a 
deliberate campaign of espionage, cyber sabotage, propaganda, and fake 
news to undermine American democracy in the 2016 election, and now that 
it is clear that there were high-level contacts between Trump 
associates and officials of the Russian Government, it is no longer 
being denied by anybody on either side of the aisle. What I have 
started to hear is, well, sure, they tried to hack our election, and, 
sure, they leaked thousands of emails, and, sure, they changed the 
dynamics of the campaign and what people were talking about in the 
campaign, but there is no proof that they stuffed any ballot boxes or 
they hacked into the computers. And that is true; we don't know that 
they stuffed any ballot boxes or hacked into computers, and we will 
have to see if anything comes out about that when we finally get to do 
a real comprehensive investigation. But, Mr. Speaker, the reality is 
that we should be terrified and appalled and outraged that they were 
allowed to go as far as they did.
  How many people in this body would accept a foreign entity coming 
into our congressional districts and spending millions or hundreds of 
thousands of dollars against us, hacking into our computers, releasing 
our emails, and completely changing the dynamics of the campaign?
  So when I hear from colleagues that, well, yes, they distorted the 
campaign, they hacked into the campaign, but they didn't steal the 
election, I think that they are making a distinction with no difference 
at all. If you derail the campaign, you kidnap the campaign, you hijack 
the campaign, you have altered the outcome of the election, especially 
one in which your opponent gets 2.9 million votes more than you did, 
especially in an election where you were able to torture out only the 
slenderest of electoral college victories in three States by 70,000 
votes.

                              {time}  1730

  So I simply reject the constant claim that I am hearing from 
colleagues, Mr. Speaker, that we don't need to worry about Russian 
subversion of the 2016 election because it only affected the campaign; 
it didn't necessarily affect the election outcome. To influence the 
campaign is to influence the election outcome.
  Mr. Speaker, I am seeing Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee is not 
here, so I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________